I am particularly intrigued by the idea thatfriend clutter relates to an intrinsic problem in dealing with endings, even though beginnings (marriages, births) are culturally celebrated, and every beginning marks a different ending.
some extracts :
- Technology exposes us to vastly more opportunities for making social connections, and far more effortlessly than even a stroll down the street and a handshake. Yet an etiquette for terminating those links, should they outlive their mutual benefit ? if they ever had any ? remains as absent as ever.
- Physical clutter...We think we want this stuff, but, once it becomes clutter, it exerts a subtle psychological tug. It weighs us down. The notion of purging it begins to strike as us appealing, and dumping all the crap into bin bags feels like a liberation. "Friend clutter", likewise, accumulates because it's effortless to accumulate it: before the internet....Friend clutter exerts a similar psychological pull.
- Last year, a writer of romance novels from Illinois named ArLynn Presser embarked upon what you might call an audit of her so-called friends..she made a New Year's resolution to visit them all, to find out why or, indeed, whether they were friends.
- [however] according to an ever-growing body of evidence, social media isn't making us lonelier or less deeply connected. Instead, study after study endorses the idea of "media multiplexity": people who communicate lots via one medium, it turns out, are the kind of people who communicate lots via others as well. Regular emailers are more likely also to be regular telephoners, one study found; people who use Facebook multiple times a day, according to another investigation, have 9% more close ties in their overall social network, on average, than those who don't. Social media builds social capital, rather than degrading it:
- Even chilling statistics about more Americans lacking a confidant now looks dubious: a new analysis by the sociologist Claude Fischer concluded that the finding arose because of a change in how the questions were asked.
- The anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar famously calculated "Dunbar's number" ? the notion that the largest number of meaningful social relationships that any one person can maintain is somewhere around 150.
- Online networks have a tendency to obliterate the nuances between different kinds of relationships. Despite Facebook's lists, privacy settings and the rest, Mullany points out, "ultimately, somebody is either your friend on Facebook or they're not. In real life, we're very political about our friendships, and I don't mean that in a bad way." There are friendships we'll let fade to nothing; others for which we'll put on a facade for a few hours at Christmas; or friendships of necessity, where we'll give the impression of intimacy without the reality. In contrast, "Facebook essentially doesn't allow us to be political."
- The more profound truth behind friend clutter may be that, as a general rule, we don't handle endings well. "Our culture seems to applaud the spirit, promise and gumption of beginnings," writes the sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot in her absorbing new book, Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free, whereas "our exits are often ignored or invisible". We celebrate the new ? marriages, homes, work projects ? but "there is little appreciation or applause when we decide (or it is decided for us) that it's time to move on". We need "a language for leave-taking", Lawrence-Lightfoot argues, and not just for funerals.